Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'United Church of England and Ireland'

This thesis focuses on three main areas of interest in ecumenical education. First, there is the historical and political context, without which the whole discussion would lack anchorage in the real situation. The evolution of Church schools within the national system of education in Britain has a direct relevance to the story. Secondly, questions concerning the nature and purpose of Church schools, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, in this country have concentrated the minds of Church leaders and educationists, particularly against the background of new curriculum developments and of financial stringency. Out of this discussion arise questions concerning the real possibilities for closer ecumenical cooperation in education between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in Britain, in the light of ecclesiastical directives to do together whatever is possible and permitted. The atmosphere has been changed following the Second Vatican Council and the exchange of visits between Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Runcie of Canterbury in 1982 and 1989. The third area for consideration is the possibility of ecumenical schools in which cooperation is more than amicable coexistence but takes a concrete institutional form: how do the converging discussions within the two communions on matters of theology, religious education, and the essential purpose of having Church schools at all, relate to the realities of educational practice at the 'chalk-face'? To try to illuminate these problems, two case studies have been selected from the various joint Anglican/Roman Catholic schools across the country, each evolving in its own peculiar environment. One was created by the amalgamation of an Anglican girls' and a Roman Catholic mixed secondary school in suburban Surrey; the other was integrated from its conception in the polarised community of Belfast. The contrasts reflect different historical, cultural, educational and ecclesiastical traditions between England and Northern Ireland. The similarities arise in that Lagan at Belfast adopted ideas implemented at Redhill where relevant to the Irish situation. The aim of the thesis has been to identify the key processes by which ecumenical education became more than just a hypothetical dream but rather a viable option for the future.

This thesis explores the hitherto undocumented disestablishment and reconstruction of the Anglican Church of Ireland, c.1868-1870, and argues that this experience was formative in the emergence of Home Rule. Structurally, the Church’s General Synod served as a model for an autonomous Irish parliament. Moreover, disestablishment and reconstruction conditioned the political trajectories of the Protestants initially involved in the first group to campaign for a federal Irish parliament, the Home Government Association (HGA). More broadly, both the HGA and the governance of the independent Church—the General Synod—grew from the bedrock of the same associational culture. The HGA was more aligned with the public associations of Protestant-dominated Dublin intellectual life and the lay associational culture of the Church. Although the political vision advocated was different from the normal conservatism of many of its Protestant members, culturally it was entirely grounded in the recent Anglican experience.

This dissertation concerns the narrative and theological role of divine vengeance and saintly cursing in the saints’ Lives of England and Ireland, c. 1060-1215. The dissertation considers four case studies of primary material: the hagiographical and historical writings of the English Benedictines (Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Eadmer of Canterbury, and William of Malmesbury), the English Cistercians (Aelred and Walter Daniel of Rievaulx, John of Forde), the cross-cultural hagiographer Jocelin of Furness, and the Irish (examining key textual clusters connected with St. Máedóc of Ferns and St. Ruadán of Lorrha, whose authors are anonymous). This material is predominantly in Latin, with the exception of the Irish material, for which some vernacular (Middle Irish) hagiographical and historical/saga material is also considered. The first four chapters (I-IV) focus discretely on these respective source-based case studies. Each is framed by a discussion of those textual clusters in terms of their given authors, provenances, audiences, patrons, agendas and outlooks, to show how the representation of cursing and vengeance operated according to the logic of the texts and their authors. The methods in each case include discerning and explaining the editorial processes at work as a basis for drawing out broader patterns in these clusters with respect to the overall theme. The fifth chapter (V) frames a more thematic and comparative discussion of the foregoing material, dealing with the more general questions of language, sources, and theological convergences compared across the four source bases. This chapter reveals in particular the common influence and creative reuse of key biblical texts, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and the Life of Martin of Tours. Similar discussion is made of a range of common ‘paradigms’ according to which hagiographical vengeance episodes were represented. In a normative theology in which punitive miracles, divine vengeance and ritual sanction are chiefly understood as redemptive, episodes in which vengeance episodes are fatal can be considered in terms of specific sociological imperatives placing such theology under pressure. The dissertation additionally considers the question of ‘coercive fasting’ as a subset of cursing which has been hitherto studied chiefly in terms of the Irish material, but which can also be found among the Anglo-Latin writers also. Here it is argued that both bodies of material partake in an essentially shared Christian literary and theological culture, albeit one that comes under pressure from particular local, political and sociological circumstances. Looking at material on both sides of the Irish Sea in an age of reform, the dissertation ultimately considers the commonalities and differences across diverse cultural and regional outlooks with regard to their respective understandings of vengeance and cursing.

This thesis is entitled The Mediation of Market-Related Policies for the Provision of Public Second Level Education: An International Comparative Study of Selected Locations in England, Ireland and the USA. The two key words in this thesis title are 'mediation' and 'comparative'. The focus of this thesis is on the phenomenon of mediation. The market-related policies that are being examined in the light of mediation are choice policies or open enrolment policies for the provision of second level public schooling. However, this is not a thesis about school choice but rather on the factors and stakeholders that affect the mediation of a policy. As the focus is on mediation, and not on policy analysis, this study is therefore, of necessity, a qualitative one. The researcher used semi-structured interviews, combined with documentary evidence, to understand both the contexts and the interactions in which mediation of various kinds takes place. The second notable feature is that this study is a comparative one. The researcher chose three countries where market related policies were being implemented, albeit to different effect. The countries chosen were England, Ireland and the USA (Massachusetts). The comparative dimension enabled the researcher to challenge ethnocentric assumptions about the modus operandi of policy at the grass- roots level. In order to understand the operation of the market, the researcher selected comparable locations in all three countries. As 'markets' are intrinsically local, the researcher examined how policy is mediated at the local level. The three conurbations were selected on the basis of their comparability, none of which are capital cities. Research was conducted in all three locations in three separate phases: pre-pilot to ascertain their suitability; pilot work to prepare the groundwork and then the main study. In all, over sixty interviews were held at local, regional and national levels, although the focus was primarily on the local. Documentary sources were collected simultaneously. The analysis of the data was ongoing during the entire research process and progress was presented at conferences in the host research countries where useful feedback was obtained. The researcher used Bereday's comparative methodology and, by taking a factor approach, insights were gained into the cultures and contexts affecting the mediation of policy. The researcher hopes to add to comparative methodological theory through the use of multiple cross-national studies. The insights gained from the research questions: how, if at all, do the factors and stakeholders identified affect the mediation of policy, confirmed that this was indeed an area worthy of study. The outcomes, displayed in matrices in chapters 8 and 9, show that different combinations of factors affect how policies are mediated by the stakeholders and indirect factors involved in the immediate implementation of open enrolment policy. The cases also yielded idiosyncratic variants based on their particular educational histories and current circumstances. However, similar features were noted in all three countries in relation to enrolment issues. In brief, these were: increased political interaction at the local level; demographic changes on the rolls of high schools; de facto social segregation; differential funding mechanisms relating to enrolment; and different attitudes to public education on the part of interest groups in each location; and the significance of regulated space. This area is ripe for research, and there is a call in the literature for more in-depth analyses on such social interactions at the local level that affect different policy outcomes. It is hoped that this study will contribute to understanding the factors at work, both direct and indirect, which mediate policy in such a way that explain the potentially different outcomes of similar policies.

This thesis examines the controversy surrounding the doctrine of atonement among transatlantic Methodist during the Victorian and Progressive Eras. Beginning in the eighteenth century, it establishes the dominant theories of the atonement present among English and American Methodists and the cultural-philosophical worldview Methodists used to support these theories. It then explores the extent to which ordinary and influential Methodists throughout the nineteenth century carried forward traditional opinions on the doctrine before examining in closer detail the controversies surrounding the doctrine at the opening of the twentieth century. It finds that from the 1750s to the 1830s transatlantic Methodists supported a range of substitutionary views of the atonement, from the satisfaction and Christus Victor theories to a vicarious atonement with penal emphases. Beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the 1870s, transatlantic Methodists embraced features of the moral government theory, with varying degrees, while retaining an emphasis on traditional substitutionary theories. Methodists during this period were indebted to an Enlightenment worldview. Between 1880 and 1914 transatlantic Methodists gradually accepted a Romantic philosophical outlook with the result that they began altering their conceptions of the atonement. Methodists during this period tended to move in three directions. Progressive Methodists jettisoned prevailing views of the atonement preferring to embrace the moral influence theory. Mediating Methodists challenged traditionally constructed theories for similar reasons but tended to support a theory in which God was viewed as a friendlier deity while retaining substitutionary conceptions of the atonement. Conservatives took a custodial approach whereby traditional conceptions of the atonement were vehemently defended. Furthermore, that transatlantic Methodists were involved in significant discussions surrounding the revision of their theology of atonement in light of modernism in the years surrounding 1900 contributed to their remaining on the periphery of the Fundamentalist-Modernist in subsequent decades.

This dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.

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Accounts of the Catholic Church's response to those disclosing sexual abuse by clergy to diocesan safeguarding commissions (formerly child protection commissions) in England and Wales are analysed and compared. The accounts given and the conclusions reached by the Church and those it employs or has commissioned are considered alongside the experiences reported by survivors. The contrasts between these narratives are discussed using techniques underpinned by critical discourse analysis and highlighting service user perspectives. Reports for the period to 2010 and published in 2011 by the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission and Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors are discussed in detail, with the resulting analysis of the narratives emerging arguably reflecting a broader discourse. It is suggested that, despite attempts to present the situation differently, the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales continues to be hampered in its efforts to respond sensitively to the needs of those who have been abused, because, as an institution, it also continues to serve conflicting legitimacy communities, and that, as a result, it risks further alienating those victims and survivors who have been led to expect that their needs will be prioritised over the financial interests and reputation of the institution.